Mushin-Sho

Stumbled across this interesting-disturbing-amusing image amidst re-searching my research;

Posted on Isohunt.com, my favorite torrent search engine.

"Canadian artists such as Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Chantal Kreviazuk, Sum 41, Stars, Raine Maida (Our Lady Peace), Dave Bidini (Rheostatics), Billy Talent, John K. Samson (Weakerthans), Broken Social Scene, Sloan, Andrew Cash and Bob Wiseman, have formed a new Canadian Music Creators Coalition (CMCC). They are speaking out against the same entertainment industry associations such as the RIAA and CRIA, who claims to represent artist rights. Stop the piracy! Feed the artists! Apparently that’s not the case according to the CRIA’s own study. Talk about irony. 

Canadian Music Creators Coalition wrote:

1. Suing Our Fans is Destructive and Hypocritical

Artists do not want to sue music fans. The labels have been suing our fans against our will, and laws enabling these suits cannot be justified in our names. We oppose any copyright reforms that would make it easier for record companies to do this. The government should repeal provisions of the Copyright Act that allow labels to unfairly punish fans who share music for non-commercial purposes with statutory damages of $500 to $20,000 per song.

2. Digital Locks are Risky and Counterproductive

Artists do not support using digital locks to increase the labels’ control over the distribution, use and enjoyment of music or laws that prohibit circumvention of such technological measures. The government should not blindly implement decade-old treaties designed to give control to major labels and take choices away from artists and consumers. Laws should protect artists and consumers, not restrictive technologies. Consumers should be able to transfer the music they buy to other formats under a right of fair use, without having to pay twice.

3. Cultural Policy Should Support Actual Canadian Artists

The vast majority of new Canadian music is not promoted by major labels, which focus mostly on foreign artists. The government should use other policy tools to support actual Canadian artists and a thriving musical and cultural scene. The government should make a long-term commitment to grow support mechanisms like the Canada Music Fund and FACTOR, invest in music training and education, create limited tax shelters for copyright royalties, protect artists from inequalities in bargaining power and make collecting societies more transparent."

This is a hilarious addendum to Sarah’s post about my wrinkle free clothing. I asked my students if my wardrobe helped establish authority, presence, respect, distance or anything else that a young teacher would need. One student wrote this wholly embarrassing note:

I think earlier in the class you asked if your attire helped you establish authority, and I’d say the GQ look does help, initially. Since you’re young I believe it’s harder for you to establish authority, and the clothing does help. But after we got to know you it wasn’t necessary. By then it was only good for a few laughs because you’d often come into class with about 3 layers on, sweating your ass off.

…yes…embarrassing…and admittedly I sweat easily, but also steam cleaning par exellance!

Some will laugh, some will cry, and the rest of us who are academically neurotic will see these as aesthetic appropriations in the service of promoting a quasi-revolution that merely aggrandizes a marginal company as ‘image’ and ‘lifestyle’, distracting through comic play attention that should otherwise be given to capitalist exploitation, fetishized image/ imaginations, and run on sentences, all while, at the meta level, preventing this theorist from doing his work.

clikcy the picky to see more…you know you want to…

Kristine insists that Family Guy has nothing on The Simpsons but I would argue otherwise. This has nothing to do with anything and may be in totally bad taste but, then again, that would just be performing the FG theory.

From http://www.familyguyquotes.com/

Peter: Hey hey I got an idea. Lets play "I Never." You got to drink if you did the thing that the person says they never did.

Cleveland: Oh I got one, I never slept with a women with the lights on.
(They all drink.)

Joe: I’ll go next, uh I never had sex with Cleveland’s wife.
(Quagmire and Cleveland drink.)

Peter: alright lets see uh, I never did a chick in a Logan airport bathroom.
(Only Quagmire drinks.)

****About 33 drinks later****

Peter: God lets see what else is there um…I never gave a reach-around to a spider monkey while reciting the Pledge of Alligence.

Quagmire: Oh God.
(Quagmire takes a drink.)

Joe: I uh I never picked up an illegal alien at Home Depot to take home a choke me while I touch myself.

Quagmire: Oh come on!
(Quagmire drinks again.)

Peter: I never did the same thing except with someone from Joann Fabrics.
Quagmire: Oh God this is ridiculous. You guys suck! (Drinks more and passes out.)

The chair bookshelf; thanks to my brother for this link.

Bibliochaise

Also, a brief word up to my favorite, and best, defenseman in the NHL, Nick Lidstrom.

Afford me a moment of nostalgia: I remember first getting into Wing’s hockey in 6th grade when Lidstrom was a novice player but paired with Hall of Fame defenseman Paul Coffey. It was amazing to watch the grace and effortless speed Coffey displayed on both ends of the ice, but even more fun to see the on-ice coaching/ mentoring he gave Nick. I knew back then that Lidstrom would be a top defenseman, and the world caught up with my precocious vision by 11th grade by awarding him the Norris Trophy as best defenseman for several consecutive years.

More than any particular hunk of iron, Lidstrom received the highest honor any active player in the NHL can get, a complement from Ur-Captain Steve Yzerman. After winning the Cup and receiving the playoff MVP award, Lidstrom was joyous but was struck dumb when a reporter told him that the Captain had always thought of him as the most valuable player on the team, for years. I nodded my head as the taste of tears hit my wide smile.

Then and now, Lidstrom is efficiency and elegance personified. The prediction from ESPN for this years Norris Trophy winner:

Prediction: For 28 minutes a night, nearly every slap shot on goal, outlet pass, power-play goal and regal air—Lidstrom is simply the best.

I’m knee deep in paper research yet I am still concerned about blogging, or keeping up my blog even minimally. To this end, I offer this quote from Zizek who stole my idea of a teleological temporality that emerges from a typological reading of the world, couched it in psychoanalytic terms, made it relevant to the contemporary moment and finally published it in Playboy.

I should sue that bastard…

Here is the underlying presupposition, the unknown known: Under their skin, all people desire to become Americans, and their violence against the U.S. is ultimately an act of envy and despair at their failure to achieve this, a failure caused by their racial or cultural backwardness. All that is needed is to give people a chance, to liberate them from their imposed constraints and they will join us in our ideological dream.  

Superman as Christ???

Movie trailer for the return "of My only son."  

What the underworld [the place we heathens are going to] is this nonsense?? And why is he still wearing the American flag color tights?

I am officially terrified, or, to channel St. Paul/Kierkegaard for a moment, I am in “fear and trembling.” [The grammar of the previous sentence, like its subject, is a mystery]

V.S. Ramachandran, an uber neuroscientist, on consciousness; link to full artilce

 I mean, if you ask anybody in my field, the underlying belief is that there are neurons and that their activity more or less explains, or corresponds to, what we mean by being conscious, being aware. Not all neural activity – there’s a lot going on in your brain which doesn’t emerge into consciousness – but a subset of this neural activity. And once you understand that, it’s a perfect one-to-one correlation. We then start asking, but what is red? You see, this firing explains when you see red and when you don’t, when you see green and when you don’t; but what is the actual sensation?

The standard answer of neuroscientists would be: that’s like asking you to explain all the properties of matter – the electrons, string theory and all that. And then suppose you ask what actually is an electron? The scientists will tell you that’s not a meaningful question. You’ll get a similar answer from any neuroscientist.

But that doesn’t mean the problem disappears. If you are a thinking, questioning human being, you always wonder about why you are here. When you talk about consciousness, it is also linked to questions like the meaning of existence – why am I here? Is it purely accidental that we are born? Is it, as King Lear said, that when we are born we cry because we have come to this great stage of fools? Of course, all the great poets, all the great philosophers, have written about this.

The only thing I will say is there have been all these revolutions in science. If you think about it, each of them has had a dehumanising impact.

First, for example, there was the Copernican revolution saying there is nothing special about this little speck of dust, which is what the earth is. That’s already humiliating – that you don’t have a privileged place in the cosmos.

Then comes the Darwinian revolution saying you’re just a hairless ape. That, again, is humiliating – that you are not the climax of creation, but are, in fact, the product of random processes of natural selection.

Then this Freudian revolution, saying you are not in charge, that your behaviour is largely governed by unconscious motives and drives.

And then the most recent thing, the DNA - that there is no vital spirit, it’s a molecule. As Watson said, there are only molecules, everything else is sociology. He was, of course, saying this tongue in cheek. And now the neuroscientist’s version – Crick’s astonishing hypothesis – that you are just a pack of neurons; that’s all a human being is. Now the question is: is that true? We don’t know yet. We have to remain agnostic. But we have to take that as far as we can. That’s the way science works.

Another interesting question is: why do we get such a thrill out of being humiliated, in being diminished in each instance?

A photo from my brother who is doing really well with the genre that has been forced on him, family pictures.

I miss my baby cuz…

As I admitted to a friend, the following weeks will be hermetic. The semester’s close brings with it a unique brand of insanity that seamlessly blends insecurity, excitement, terror, loneliness, connections to long dead authors, avoidance and total immersion; quite the experience. For a parallel experience, go bungee jumping while doing acid with a partner who broke up with you last week using a line from Heidegger. Alternatively, one could also try to deconstruct/ psychoanalyze the previous sentence.

nothing to say

They just found the Gospel of Judas!! Check it out here.

Although I doubt Zizek was the first one to say so, he is the most famous voice attempting to re-understand Judas as the most Christian precisely because he allowed the Christ-event to happen.

Now, we may have authentic textual proof of it.

Victory is mine!

Thanks Blogsome support staff for the prompt help. No, the Family Guy reference is not gratuitous but will hopefully preview a post regarding the genius of the show. Of course, the post will, must, come after I finish my papers (or will be hashed in the service of my other ongoing project, avoiding work, aka ‘comedy as theory’).

My entire blog went italics on me and I have no idea why; apologies to my readers for straining your eyes.

My diplomatic ‘everyone love me’ side is totally paralyzed, nervous, taken aback, while my indignantly pissed off surface is in total solidarity. 

In sum, yeah…what she said.

f—-in hater biatches…

    I’m totally geeked at the moment after reading an awesome essay on the relationship between The Sopranos and HBO’s brand identity. The essay is called “The Sopranos as HBO brand equity: The art of commerce in the age of digital reproduction” and is part of a compilation, This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos, edited by David Lavery. End bibliographic information.

    The authors, three of them, are not concerned with a close reading of the series but seek to place the show in the larger continuum of television history, particularly as it has been transformed by socio-technological innovations. They divide TV’s history into three particular sections, TV I, II and III, the latter most being of primary concern for me both here and in relation to my project. More specifically, the authors layout the difference between first and second order commodity relations, stating that the former (for television) is manifest in ‘pay channels’ such as HBO that must measure viewer satisfaction in terms of monthly payments, while the latter characterizes cable and broadcast networks who strive to capture viewer “attention,” which is then commodified and sold to advertisers. Essentially, first order commodity relations are more direct (I ask you for money) than second order relations (I tap you on the shoulder and my friend asks you for money). Consequently, HBO must spend a great deal of resources creating and sustaining a “buzz,” i.e., “they must develop a strong brand identity” (47).

Found something

    Brand identities are not merely spectacles or simply ways of individuating but are “now recognized widely as business assets of genuine economic value…[Branding] now extends to organizations who a few years ago would never have considered themselves “brands” (charities, utilities, cites…etc).” I would argue that criminal organizations too have begun to brand themselves. Let me briefly offer some examples from my two primary texts, a Hindi film called Company and another HBO show The Wire.

    Company is about a Mumbai based criminal collective that takes on the name “Company” only after the press has branded it as such. The organization begins to stage mock attacks on high-ranking businessmen in order to extort money from them, a highly successful strategy that is, of course, supplemented with the occasional execution of those who do not comply. There are two interesting aspects of this strategy. First, the attacks are performative, traumatically so, and are used to mine for the fuel that makes such criminal collectives run, fear. Secondly, these performances coupled with the real murders, sustain a very particular brand, Company, which in turn is used to generate income. After a Company member murders a corrupt official, the leader (Malik) remarks that the bravado with which the killing was committed will “bring much fame to the Company.”
    Eerily, both HBO and Company elicit monthly payments for their virtuostic labor.

[Conflating the threat of murder and television is clearly idiotic and I have to think through the parallels between the real shifts in late capital and those enacted in these particular criminal collectives. Also, I am flirting with the notion of these criminal collectives as perverse representations, allegorical even, of late capital itself but am not comfortable with such a neat reading. It seems to me that there is an interesting turn to be made, namely that the allegory is both born and deployed through the very thing it allegorizes, corporate capital.]

    The Wire offers a much clearer example of criminal collectives engaging in, and subtly manipulating, branding. After months of offering only poor quality cocaine, the sub-commandant begins to make alliances (read corporate consolidation). However, a better product alone cannot save the organization because they have been marked inferior, i.e. their brand has lost equity. The organization thus enacts a strategy employed by MCI during its own troubled times; they change their name. The idea itself comes from the sub-commandant’s Economics teacher, and is deployed brilliantly, creating several brands that, although selling the same product and under the same leadership, fake rivalries that give the illusion of a genuine economic-capitalistic struggle for each junkie’s business.

    Returning to the essay that inspired this writing, the authors end with a brilliant and highly useful move. “As class definers, brands currently function as the primary currency of a system of distinctions that marks off “insiders” from “outsiders”…they are, quite literally, ways of “labeling” the self and others.” Awesome. I realize that the insight itself is neither unique nor particularly profound but it does reintroduce alterity into the very heart of the ‘branding’ project. To be Levinasian for a moment, alterity presupposes a self, or in the particular discourse of our class, a collectivity, which in this instance is organized around a fetishized image. However, in the larger project on criminality the “brand” also creates a performative collective (or rather, one that performs) in addition to those who are its victims or fetishizers. Finally, and re-acknowledging JF’s point, both the brand and the particular performances that sustain it are inscribed in a pre-modern, tribal, highly patriarchal organizations. That is, branding will be an interesting notion to play with but will have to be complexified with a better understanding of the heirarchies and structures of execution.

Exhausted and inspired.